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4 deference & violence in danville As he finished his autobiographical Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, William Alexander Percy—planter, writer, and (as he supposed) racial liberal and ‘‘friend of the Negro’’—fretted over the increasingly acrimonious state of race relations in the South. Published in 1941, just before the southern legal and cultural edifice of racial segregation and official white supremacy began to dissolve under the ideological strain of World War II, Lanterns on the Levee included a ‘‘Note on Racial Relations’’ in which Percy worried about the erosion of black manners. Referring to white violence, he ‘‘noted that the Negro is losing his most valuable weapon of defense—his good manners.’’ He continued: ‘‘When a Negro now speaks of a ‘man’ he means a Negro; when he speaks of a ‘lady’ he means a Negress; when he speaks of a ‘woman’ he means a white woman. Such manners are not only bad, they are not safe, and the frame of mind that breeds them is not safe. Covert insolence is not safe for anybody, anywhere, at any time.’’1 Identifying and interpreting ‘‘covert insolence’’ among the subjugated has become something of a cottage industry in the academy since Percy condemned its deployment by black southerners. Inspired by the work of social historians such as Eric J. Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, the search for what James C. Scott called the ‘‘hidden transcript ’’ of resistance has become a central pursuit of scholars interested in questions of domination and resistance. The uncovering of what Scott dubbed ‘‘infrapolitics’’ and what Czech philosopher Václav Benda called ‘‘the parallel polis’’ has focused scholarly attention on the political subtext of acts of resistance that stop short of open rebellion. The definition of politics has been broadened to include the breach of manners so vexing to Will Percy.2 Historians of the American South have profited in particular from 103 the insights gained mining the hidden transcript. Several scholars whose work preceded Scott’s formulations—Herbert Aptheker, Eugene D. Genovese, Lawrence W. Levine, Albert J. Raboteau, and Gilbert Osofsky—applied the concept of underground resistance to relations between masters and slaves in the antebellum South.3 More recently, historians have explicitly used Scott’s approach to analyze black-white relations under Jim Crow. Robin D. G. Kelley, for example, employed Scott’s notion of infrapolitics to draw attention to African Americans’ broad repertoire of acts of everyday resistance in the segregated twentieth-century South in order to show ‘‘how seemingly innocuous, individualistic acts of survival and opposition shaped southern urban politics, workplace struggles, and the social order generally .’’4 While documenting and fully appreciating the importance of urban black working-class opposition at home, in the community, and in the workplace, Kelley urges scholars to focus on black resistance to white domination in public space and ‘‘to rethink the meaning of public space as a terrain of class, race, and gender conflict.’’ It was, Kelley argues, urban public space—a city’s parks, its streets, and particularly its public transportation system—that provided most of the opportunities for acts of resistance and simultaneously embodied ‘‘the most repressive, violent aspects of race and gender oppression’’ in the Jim Crow South.5 What had been the hidden ‘‘weapons of the weak’’ in urban public spaces of the antebellum South—the ‘‘accidental’’ jostling of whites on the sidewalk or on a city trolley, the profanities and depredations muttered under one’s breath—would later become acts of covert resistance during the more rigid days of the Jim Crow era. But during the crucial transition between slavery and Jim Crow, these same acts emerged as the open and public actions of an enfranchised and politically empowered people. In the years after emancipation and before the codification of the white supremacist South, African Americans devised a series of strategies to resist white definitions of black rights, opportunities, and sociability. Not unexpectedly, conflicts arose between black and white southerners over what was proper, acceptable, or demeaning behavior in public arenas. The forms of black behavior now recognized as covert resistance in the antebellum and Jim Crow eras—such as a refusal to yield to whites on the sidewalk or the reservation of appellations of gentility for themselves—were precisely those through which black men and women asserted in public their 104 d e f e r e n c e a n d v i o l e...

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